Catholics in Suburbia

Did moving to the suburbs make U.S. Catholics more open to Vatican II reforms?

Ask not, said scholar Anthony Smith, what Catholics did to the surburbs. Ask, rather, what the suburbs have done to Catholicism.

Could it be that the 1960s migration to the suburbs was what caused so many American Catholics to so wholeheartedly embrace the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65)?

Smith, professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, Ohio, wonders.

Smith also wonders whether one of the primary characteristics of Vatican II--its openness to a changing modern world was in fact already being practiced by American Catholics who moved from urban ghettos to the suburbs, where they found themselves with Methodists and Jews for neighbors.

"Cultural critics look down their noses at the suburbs, but some people in moving into the suburbs saw themselves as pioneers and identified themselves that way," Smith said. "So we need to get beyond thinking of the suburbs as ugly strip malls and massproduced houses." The picture is far more complex than one's notion of aesthetics.

"My question," he said, "is, did the impact of Vatican II depend as much on the ranch-style housing American Catholics were moving into as it did on Gaudiam et Spes ['Joy and Hope', the council's document on The Church in the Modern World]?" The council urged Catholics "to engage their culture, their community." And these "pioneers" were doing just that.

Smith, a child of "mass suburbia" (Levittown, Md.) wants to examine the suburbs not merely as the place where Catholics went when they left the big-city ghettos, but suburbs as "complex and even controversial experiences." He aims to address "this lacuna of our understanding of Catholics -in the second half of the 20th century. I suppose all scholarship is, at some point, autobiographical. So in some ways I think this is kind of a way to figure out the world I live in and the Catholicism within it. And to inquire about the relationship between the two."

Smith was high school age when his father was transferred to Michigan. They left Levittown for "just outside East Lansing." As a teenager 20 years ago, he despised the suburbs as a "God-awful wasteland." Now he's wondering if he had it right.

"The narrative we tell of American Catholics is still urban focused," he said. It recalls a multiplicity of images: processions around urban churches, Catholic presence in the neighborhood parades, parish festivals, the Virgin Mary on the duplex lawns sheltered in a plaster-cast grotto critics called "the bathtub," kids in parochial school uniforms filling the sidewalks twice a day, nuns everywhere, priests in collars nodding hello as they went to get pipe tobacco from the neighborhood store.

But in the suburbs, what? Two signs in front of a neat corner church - one listing the Masses and the other the hour bingo starts?

Whoa, says Smith. Back up a bit before thinking of it in that limited way. "It's that we always talk more about the Catholics who stayed in the city - and there were people who stayed - than those who moved out."

Said Smith, there was "white flight" (particularly following the urban riots of the 1960s, he said), yet because Catholics were so rooted to the city parishes, Catholics left the cities at a slower rate than did Protestants and Jews. Another factor was that Protestants and Jews owned their buildings. They could more easily pickup and rebuild. Catholic churches, though, legally belonged to the diocese. Bishops, not parishioners, decided what to close and where to build anew.

The bedrock material for probing the answers - the suburban memoir and suburban studies - is only just now beginning to emerge, said Smith.

There's John McGreevy (Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter With Race in the 20th Century Urban North, Chicago University Press), who points out that urban racial conflicts often seemed to have a Catholic dimension. There's also D.J. Waldie's short memoir, Holy Land (St. Martin's Press), David Beers' Blue Sky Dreams (Harcourt) and Nicholas Dagen Bloom's Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream (Ohio State).

Is Smith, a walking, talking suburban memoir himself, pining for his own Levittown lost?

Yes, in a way he is.

After Boston College, the now 37-year-old scholar did his doctoral work in American Studies at the University of Minnesota "because the focus was on some very interesting, cutting-edge stuff in 20th-century culture. Maybe, because the Jesuits had trained me well, I started asking, 'Where are the Catholics in all this?' American culture has been formed by mass culture, yet this largest U.S. religious denomination was generally overlooked.

"The mass culture is secular. Its goals are secular--to make a buck. It is exploitive, titillating. That's the logic of it," he said. "Catholic imagery - you want me to speculate, right?

"I think a key feature would be rooted, still, in the Catholic family--the family that interacts in the suburban neighborhood with other Americans. Or, it may be something as simple as Catholic students in public schools gravitating toward one another. From those Catholic families that do expose their children to actual , Catholic culture, discourse, art and experience."